


out here everything hurts

by deuteroscopies



Series: the prophet and the king [40]
Category: Mad Max Series (Movies), Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe - Mad Max Fusion, Canon Crossover, Ghosts, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-15
Updated: 2020-07-15
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:20:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24748237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deuteroscopies/pseuds/deuteroscopies
Summary: Random pockets of strange alternate universes have been opening up in Soapberry during the black mold Blight, and can only be closed when some task -- specific to each pocket universe -- has been completed. When the ghosts of the people from their pasts start disappearing, the townsfolk realize that these pockets are where they've been sent. So off go Freddie and Ephram, to a desert wasteland of strange vehicles and dystopian road warriors.
Relationships: Freddie Watts/Ephram Pettaline
Series: the prophet and the king [40]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1551673





	out here everything hurts

**Author's Note:**

> >   
> Freddie Watts = Tom Hardy FC, Ephram Pettaline = Boyd Holbrook FC. These stories are set in the supernatural town of Soapberry Springs, in the Pacific Northwest. Freddie is a fairy con man from London, with cobalt-coloured dragonfly wings and silver fairy dust, who has a Japanese Chin familiar named Oliver; Ephram is a witch from impoverished East Kentucky who shares his body with a demon called Anaxis and has green magic of his own.  
>  [the prophet and the king 'verse tumblr](http://theprophetandtheking.tumblr.com/)  
> 

Between the two of them, fairy and witch magic, they’d been able to find one of the pocket worlds that had a certain _pull_ on them, a faintly uneasy feeling like string being tugged out from the solar plexus. For once, Ephram eschewed the trusty golf bag he'd been toting around town with him full of weapons; he strapped on his handguns and a shotgun, unworried about needing to carry ammo now that he’d figured out how to create bullets of his own silver-green magic while inside the weirdsworlds. 

He’d outfitted Freddie with a couple of pistols as well, knowing that his husband had refined his fairy dust enough to be well able to provide his own ammo as well, but had also said, “…bring the cricket bat too, honey. Always helps to have at least one melee weapon, right?” 

As Ephram hefted his own baseball bat, squinting into the broad flat sun that saturated itself out across the baked, sandy landscape like the whole thing was a cake of bronzer, he grunted, “Of course it’d be some damn desert we’d land in. Edith always did have a fascination with the Sahara.” Their clothes had shifted to suit their surroundings, Ephram noted with interest, and a little ways in the distance, they could make out a low-riding vehicle with some sort of rig on the front. “Reckon we could commandeer whatever that is instead of having to play camel for ourselves?”

Freddie, already too hot, and too despicably _sandy_ , stood beside his husband; cricket bat clutched in one hand, one of Ephram’s guns tucked into his trousers at the small of his back, and the other a welcome weight under his arm, secured there by his darling’s spare shoulder-holster, and peered along with him at the approaching car. “That sounds like a very good idea to me, sweetheart,” he concurred, squinting a bit in the sun and trying to get a better bead on the driver of the oncoming… whatever-it-was.

“Though…” Freddie frowned slightly as the thing sped up a bit, “-how do we get it to stop, do you think, without shooting out a tyre? I mean, the speed they’re going, I don’t think breaking for hitchhikers is going to be high on their list of priorities.”

“Warning shot, maybe? Give them a bit of a start?” Freddie looked up at his witch. “How good a shot are you at this distance, love? Think you could take out the windscreen?”

The fairy turned back to the rapidly nearing vehicle then, and the horizon, still contemplating their options - and the sight that greeted him, seemingly out of nowhere, made his next words dry up in his mouth, And he just stared for a moment, goggling, before finally reaching blindly for Ephram’s elbow. “Sweetheart,” he murmured, “-please tell me that’s a sodding mirage.”

But the huge violent swirls of dust and sand only billowed defiantly closer, threatening to swallow up the car - and everything else - that lay before it.

At Freddie’s suggestion about the windshield, Ephram had already slung down his shotgun; winding his hand in the strap, he set it against his shoulder and squinted down the barrel, murmuring, “…iffen it ain’t invisible or imaginary, darlin', I can shoot it.”

But the same sudden dust storm that caught Freddie’s attention swirled into Ephram’s broader range of vision as well, and he lifted his head to goggle at it in a pulse of sheer panic. Shooting at cars was within his wheelhouse; dealing with miles of sand and a maelstrom of it coming straight at you was not. “If that’s a mirage then I been wildly misled as to the tempting nature of em,” he grunted, and raised his shotgun again, firing off a round that echoed loud where they were, then had its sound immediately lost in the oncoming cacophany. 

“C’mon,” Ephram said as soon as he’d fired and switched his gun for his bat, and started off in a long-legged run towards the vehicle. Which, in the rapidly closing distance, screeched and skidded, taking a turn so sharp that it raised onto two wheels along its side and did a half-spin before thumping back down into the sand, motionless. As they approached, they could see two figures in the mangled car with its sharp welded-metal fins and spikes – one moving, frantically unhooking a thick and brutal-looking IV tube of sorts from the still one and then booting his dead body out into the whirling sand.

But by that point Freddie and Ephram had reached the car, weapons held aloft, and the pale ring-eyed man froze with his tube leaking a few weak spurts of blood. “What octane are you?” he asked, looking frantically from one to the other. “If we’re going to outrun the storm we need fuel!”

Freddie followed Ephram as best he could through the sand, but, having much shorter legs than his husband, he fell behind rather quickly - and it was only the sudden screaming stop of the oncoming car (if you could call it a car), that allowed him to catch up again so quickly. 

The storm rapidly eating up the desert as it drew closer, Freddie took aim at the scarred skeletal creature bleeding in front of them, cocking the gun, unsure whether their better option was to steal the monstrous vehicle outright, or to simply demand a ride in it; his eyes darting to the body quickly becoming a part of the dune not far away, who was making a very convincing case for theft with every passing moment. By then though, the pale man was gibbering away about octane, and talking about outrunning the storm, and Freddie’s concentration had begun to suffer. 

“What octane are _we_?” he repeated in confusion, “What are you-” But then the penny dropped a bit sickly, and the fairy realised _precisely_ what their new friend, Jack Skellington, was on about. 

What the sodding _tube_ was for.

Of course it was. 

Flaming _Blight_.

In the time it had taken for Freddie to understand this though, the man had begun to look at Ephram with a manic sort of gleam in his eyes, reaching out to grab the sheriff’s arm and yank him forward. “You - Stretch - what are you?!” he demanded, “Glory be - you’re big enough; you must be hi-octane! Come on, I gotta hitch you up! Let’s go, let’s go!” He yanked on Ephram’s arm again, and Freddie reached out to yank him back.

Restored magic or not, Cinquefoil or not, fairies healed better and faster than witches did - and fairies also had no blood type, being that they were invulnerable to human illnesses and ailments. They matched everyone. 

So while Freddie’s general position was that everyone else could go hang _long_ before he’d put himself out, Ephram was very much _not_ everyone else. He was Ephram, and therefore the only person in the world that Freddie would always put first.

“Not him,” the fairy said, “I’ve got more in the tank.” 

Ephram was dubious but ultimately willing to offer up his veins if that was what it would take to get them away from the oncoming dust storm, so he mumbled some sort of assent as the bony creature urged him on with increasing frantic pulls. But then he found himself gripped from the other side, and Freddie had tugged him back, Ephram’s heels slip-skidding on the sand and making him quick-step to shore up against Freddie’s arm and in his protective circuit. 

“Oh,” Ephram blurted when Freddie – in a tone that brooked no argument – said that he’d be the infusion fuel instead, the pale man scrambing across the seat to hurriedly jab the tube into Freddie’s arm and instantly gasp in relief as blood flowed bright red from fairy to him. Ephram didn’t say more than that, trusting that his husband knew exactly what he was doing (Freddie was not in the habit of making noble sacrifices, one of the many things the two of them agreed on wholeheartedly), and heading around to the other side of the car.

“If you’re gettin’ a top-up, then I’ll drive the fuckin’ vehicle.” Ephram shouldered the skinny man out of the way despite his flailing protests– “I’m a War Boy! If I die today, I need to die chrome!” –and sent him toppling into a pile of limbs in the back as Freddie took the front passenger seat. There wasn’t anything on wheels that Ephram had yet met that he wasn’t able to drive, and as the car lurched to skidding life he aimed it straight at the vast open desert with the storm stampeding up in the splintered rearview.

“Is that a canyon up yonder?” Ephram squinted hard, head ducking, then cursed and reached for the controls to toggle on something he instinctively felt would get them going faster. “My name is Lurr,” the War Boy said, lurching up between the seats to look from one to the other and then to reach forward and turn a dial on the dashboard next to the toggle; the car belched something that smelled like pure diesel and then shot forward about five feet, skimming the surface of the sand and then landing on tires that now had scaly extrusions, scooping through the shifting terrain instead of whirring uselessly. “Go to that canyon and we’ll die! We’ll all die! They hate men! They hate all stilt-walkers and crow-fishers!”

“Pleasure to meet you, Lurr,” Freddie said through gritted teeth as Ephram skillfully careened them across the shifting sands in the direction of the canyon he’d spotted, the makeshift transfusion a constant skin-crawling flow punctuated by flashes of pain at the point of connection. And, catching his husband’s eye the fairy nodded, agreeing that the canyon was likely their best hope for emerging relatively unscathed from the storm. “I’m Freddie,” he went on, “-and he’s Ephram, and unfortunately for you, darling, you’re outvoted; because we have no intention of dying today, chrome or otherwise, so that canyon is absolutely going to be our first stop.”

Freddie braced himself against the dashboard with one hand, the other finding its way to a white knuckled grip on Ephram’s thigh. “But you needn’t worry about whoever ‘they’ are, love, I promise.” He inclined his head toward his darling, who was laser focused on the terrain in front of them, blue eyes bright like flames. “Ephram’s only tall, not actually walking on stilts.” They flew over the uneven ground, crashing down again with a violent jolt. “And strictly speaking, we _are_ men, obviously, but we’re actually a fairy and a witch first, so that should offset things a bit.”

Freddie glanced at the War Boy in the broken mirror. “Well. For us, at least.”

The storm raged ever closer but Ephram was nearly on top of the canyon by now, and Freddie leaned in to his husband’s ear, raising his voice a bit to be heard over the roar of Armageddon behind them. “Drive us straight in, sweetheart,” he all but shouted, “I’ll make sure we can live through the landing.”

And when they shot out over the gorge, Freddie raised his hands and aimed twin blasts of shimmering silver dust at the roof of the car, leaving the air inside thick with magic, and replacing their top with what was effectively a big fuck-off parachute.

Which, if they were lucky, wouldn’t be rendered totally useless by the wind.

And if they weren’t, well… 

His next trick would just have to be better, wouldn’t it?

“A fairy?” Lurr’s already wild eyes got more unbalanced as he shot glances between the two men. “A witch? How can you be and still be men? What world do you come from, are you breeders there?”

“We ain’t close enough pals yet for you to be askin’ them sorts of questions, Lurr,” Ephram said, his thigh tight under Freddie’s grip as he narrowed his focus to what Freddie was telling him. To drive the car straight out over the drop as the way to escape the billows of sand that were crawling up on their back higher and louder with every second.

Ephram didn’t pause for even a heartbeat. He gunned it, Lurr’s shouts rising to a panicked crash as he reached forward, trying to claw and hit at Ephram to stop him, but momentum had already done its part and now gravity was the only thing they were beholden to. Except … except that Freddie had blown his dust into service, and the car’s arc into the air with wheels spinning and screeching turned into a controlled fall. 

The thick parachute silk (or whatever the fairy dust equivalent was) flapped rapidly as they descended, faster than they would have liked but Ephram kept his neck craned forward, peering down into the canyon, muttering, “–looks like an even enough stretch down there, I can get us landed decent I think, just gotta–”

The sandstorm roiled out over the canyon, and they found themselves in choking darkness as it blotted out the pounding sun. “They’ll shred us, you’re not breeders here,” Lurr choked, and then there was blood whirling around in the car along with the fairy dust and the sand as he tore out the leads from his neck, Freddie’s arm, and the car – thrown off its already tenuous equilibrium – careened sideways on its fall to hit the rock wall of the canyon. 

“Fuck almighty!” Ephram shouted, and wrenched the steering wheel around so the sharp scoops on the wheels, the spiked side of the car, scraped against and into the crumbly stone. Not all of them caught, but some did: some enough to slow their plummet until the car slammed down on the canyon bottom, tilted precariously to one side. To a man, all three of them leaned heavily in the other direction, Ephram reaching out with one arm to wrap around Freddie as his fairy hauled himself bodily closer to compensate. For a moment nothing; then the vehicle thumped onto all four tires and the parachute top landed on them hard, loaded with the gravel that had made up the heavier component of the sandstorm.

“Fucking hell!” Freddie swore, grimacing in pain as Lurr yanked their horrific tubing out, sending a spray of dark red blood splashing through the wash of silver in the air. He twisted round in his seat to grab the War Boy by the filthy rag of a scarf tied round his neck and held him there, dark blue eyes flashing, Lurr slapping at his arm to get him off. “Sit still and bloody _behave yourself_!” the fairy commanded, spots of blood dripping down his cheeks. 

He tightened his grip just enough to widen Lurr’s eyes - “Go on, yeah? Claw at my husband again; see what happens” - before letting go entirely as the car smashed into the rock face, jolting them hard enough to make Freddie’s teeth rattle and tossing him across the front seat like a rag doll, knocking him into Ephram. “Sorry, sweetheart,” he muttered through a clenched jaw, focusing on keeping the glamoured parachute in tact as Ephram jerked the wheel, the witch doing everything in his power to keep them from crashing down in a fiery heap.

Which, somehow, miraculously, they managed, as the howling storm roared across the canyon, burying them in grit and rock and sand. 

They’d been back on four wheels for a good thirty seconds - the sound of the storm growing fainter as it passed, the weight of the parachute just short of smothering as they pressed tight, holding each other - when Freddie coughed and murmured, “Hold on, love,” before expelling enough dust through his pores and his open mouth to slowly turn the rubble and the parachute both into white downy feathers. Able, once he could see and breathe again, to manipulate the lingering breezes to scatter the feathers across the floor of the canyon, and then letting the glamour drop again.

His arm was still bleeding a bit - his dust having been otherwise occupied at the time the tube had been snatched out - but now it rapidly began to heal, and Freddie looked at Ephram, concern in his eyes, Lurr not even a consideration for him. “Are you alright?” he asked, touching his husband’s cheek, “Anything need healing?”

The fairy finally glanced wryly back at the sickly-looking wraith who appeared to be cowering in the backseat, then out at their surroundings in search of the monsters that were apparently coming to eat them alive. 

“What do you think, sweetheart,” he asked, “- guns out? I mean, assuming Lurr’s not _completely_ mental, we’re only slightly safer down here than we were out there…” 

The transformation of their parachute canopy and its gravel into feathers was a welcome relief to Ephram; to their tag-along Lurr, though, it was nothing short of a terrifying miracle. The War Boy flung himself on the floor of the stripped-out backseat, cowering with his arms over his bald head and whimpering something about Valhalla that made no sense to Ephram.

Best he stays there for a minute, Ephram thought. Keep him out of our hair while we shore up a plan. Truly hurting Lurr wasn’t something either of them would entertain the notion of, but at this point it was a toss-up whether he was useful or detrimental to their mission. And the welfare of a pocket-world denizen weighed against Edith? Well.

“I’m awright, I’m good,” Ephram assured his husband, glad to see that Freddie’s dust was kicking in to take care of his nasty-looking wound. “But yeah, guns out.” Just to be sure, Ephram attempted putting their banged-up car into gear, but the engine made a distressingly screechy whirring noise and then fell silent after a loud _ker-thunk_. “Looks like we’ll be hoofing it, regardless,” Ephram remarked, not bothering with trying to open his crunched door and opting to vault out of the newly-convertible’d vehicle. “C’mon, bubba,” he said not unkindly to Lurr, reaching down to haul the War Boy out. “Here, you can have this. Ain’t gonna leave you unarmed if these monsters you’re talkin’ bout–”

“The Vuvalini,” Lurr said, gratefully taking the baseball bat that Ephram passed him. Now that he was out of the car and they could see him in the light, Ephram realized that he wasn’t much more than a teenager, and he shot Freddie a look as he got his rifle slung to his front. That pretty much clinched it. Weirdo or not, Ephram wasn’t about to leave this brainwashed kid to perish in the desert canyon. Lurr licked his thumb and pressed it against the gash in his neck where the blood lead had been buried. “I can help you go where you’re going,” he said, looking between fairy and witch. “Since you’re breeders.” He seemed to have settled on this definition, and Ephram supposed it was as good as any, out here in this wasteland.

Freddie climbed out of the car himself as Ephram extricated the overwhelmed Lurr from the backseat, retrieving the gun from the back of his trousers, and looking around cautiously at their new environment; instinctively wanting to stand as close to Ephram as possible, but denying the impulse, as he recognised it as largely unhelpful. 

Comforting - but unhelpful.

Afer all, whenever these Vuva-wotsits turned up, they would all need a bit of room to manoeuvre if they had any hope of defending themselves.

It was impossible to miss though - now that they had a clear look at him - that Lurr was quite a bit more boy than man; and when Ephram caught Freddie’s eye, still very much the conscientious Sheriff even out here in the wastelands, the fairy gave a subtle nod of understanding and concession, knowing that his husband would never be able to simply turn his back and allow a child to fend for themselves. 

Lurr was theirs now for the duration; all they could do was hope that he didn’t make anything _worse_ \- becauseFreddie got the distinct feeling that Lurr’s ‘help’ might be a bit subject to interpretation.

He couldn’t help a chuckle though at the young man’s assertion that Freddie and Ephram were Breeders, and he shot his witch a small grin before looking back to their new friend. “That’s very kind of you, darling,” the fairy said, “As soon as we work out where exactly that is, I promise you’ll be the first to know.”

Freddie looked around again, gun in hand, taking in the almost eerie sort of stillness in the canyon - an unnatural sort of stillness; as though the canyon itself were somehow holding its breath - and he squinted a bit, noticing something in the sand a little ways off. 

“Ephram…” he said softly, motioning in the direction he was looking, “…sweetheart, that’s a woman, isn’t it?” Freddie stared at the body strewn across the canyon floor. “Or it used to be…”

The stillness felt more oppressive now than ever, and Freddie looked around, his skin crawling with the sensation of being watched. “So I suppose the best question at this point is ‘now what?’”

“….only I haven’t got the first bloody idea.”

Ephram couldn’t help an answering grin at Freddie’s amused look over Lurr’s new definition of their status in this place; clearly the War Boy had some sort of peculiarly delineated view of sex and gender and what those entailed, and had put the fairy and witch down in firmly Breeder category. “And here I thought we was queer enough to automatically buck that definition,” Ephram murmured, Lurr nodding enthusiastically despite Ephram’s comment being to cross-purposes of his own.

All levity was chased out, though, by the sight of what Freddie alerted him to, and Ephram’s forehead puckered in dismay at the sight of the corpse laid out in their path. “Yeah,” he said as Lurr gave a little whimper and accompanying two-step of frenetic worry. “And I’m reckoning whatever it is we need to find, be it some monster like in the other blight worlds or these Vuvalinis, we gotta start heading in yonder direction. So might as well strike out now afore it gets dark.”

“Don’t want to be caught in the dark here,” Lurr said wisely, his eyes round and red-rimmed. He settled into a sort of semi-hunched scuttle behind the other two, and Ephram glanced at him – Lurr gave an encouraging, toothy smile – before sighing and starting to walk, Freddie at his side.

“Well, Mister Frodo,” he said, “best hope Gollum there don’t take it into his head to stop us from getting to Mount Doom.” Ephram nudged his shoulder against his husband, wanting a little bit of physical contact to ground himself. He wasn’t much worried that Lurr would decide to start swinging the baseball bat at their skulls; the kid had it dragging in the sand like a caveman’s club, more concerned with half-hiding behind the two men.

Freddie smiled back at his husband’s little shoulder nudge, taking the opportunity to catch Ephram’s fingers with his own; hooking them together, in need of a little physical contact himself - and he glanced back at Lurr, who was gamely trying to affect a confidence he clearly didn’t feel, big eyes wide and nervous in spite of his motivational smile; obviously in no hurry to assume a leadership role down here in the canyon.

“If he tries,” the fairy said drily, “-he’ll understand rather quickly where the fae get their reputation for spite, because I am very much _not_ in the mood.”

Even down in the canyon where it was cooler and more sheltered, Ephram could see swirls of dust rising ahead of them, swishing spirals of red and ochre. It wasn’t until the sand was accompanied by a new sound – familiar, a whirring buzz, a mechanical sound – that he realized the dust devils were harbingers rather than weather features. “IT’S THEM!” Lurr suddenly shrieked, almost trying to climb Ephram, clawing in terror this time; he pointed over Ephram’s shoulder as shapes resolved through the sand. Motorcycles, strangely modified, their riders bearing down faster than the three erstwhile travellers had time to do anything in response.

Freddie thought nothing at all of the blowing swirling sand in the distance though, assuming that whipping winds and eyes full of grit were simply standard procedure in this particular little pocket of Hell - but at the sound of the engines, he stopped short, squeezing Ephram’s fingers tighter, his stomach churning as Lurr’s ravenous monsters approached.

The War Boy, on the other hand, immediately began to panic, frothing and screeching in horror at Ephram’s back, pawing and quaking until Freddie lashed out in frustration and caught him by the collar, yanking him off his husband and dropping into the dirt in a heap. But he was up again in seconds, simultaneously projecting a desire to protect Freddie and Ephram, and to be protected _by_ them, as the motorcycle riders skidded to a stop. Lurr was howling now, brandishing his baseball bat as he crowded against Freddie and Ephram while some of the riders cut their motorcycle engines. And then one of them, riding behind the driver, took off their helmet and Ephram couldn’t help but give a ringing shout of relieved joy.

“ _Granmaw_!”

Shaking Lurr off again - the boy was a bloody _limpet_ \- Freddie tightened his grip on his gun, his finger on the trigger… only to nearly drop it in shock when one rider removed her helmet, and Ephram named her in a shout of grateful happiness.

Squinting into the dust, the fairy called, “Edith?! Gran, is that you?” before wheeling on Lurr, who was still growling and spitting, holding his bat aloft. “Settle down,” Freddie commanded, grabbing the bat and forcing the skinny boy to lower it, “She’s _family_ , you tit. Now belt up like a good boy and let the grown-ups talk.”

“Fa-family? Family?” Lurr repeated, swinging his big-eyed face between Freddie and Ephram for some kind of explanation. Ephram would have felt bad for the kid, but at the moment Lurr was dead last on his list of priorities – especially when Edith alighted from the motorcycle with the same energy and verve he remembered her swinging down from behind Emory, coming over with her (very _real_ -looking) arms outstretched to her boys.

And then she was there, solid and steady as she grabbed onto both Freddie and Ephram to squeeze them tightly. “My lil darlins,” Edith growled, kissing their cheeks as they instinctively bent like saplings to make it easier on her. “You cain’t imagine how glad I am to be able to kiss these sweet faces. Although–” she frowned suddenly up at Ephram, “din’t I say not to come here, silly duckling? Last thing I want is for the two of you to end up trapped in this godforsaken fuckin’ shitstain of a scorch-trail wasteland, pardon my French.”

“As if either of us could leave you without comin’ to look,” Ephram said indignantly. “We come to get you out, Granmaw. Freddie and me ain’t leaving without you, and between the two’ve us we maybe might could even out-stubborn _you,_ so let’s not waste time testing the theory and just get on with the exodus, how’s that sound?” Ephram hugged his great-grandmother and his husband tighter, and Lurr, with a hopeful needy sound, shoved himself against Freddie’s back to try and get in on the embrace as much as he could.

Ephram didn’t bother to remove the War Boy. Let him have his moment. It was all they could give him; they’d be gone quickly enough, if the piercing whistle that one of the other Vuvalini gave in warning was any indication. She pointed up to the lip of the canyon, high above them; flat vehicles with caterpillar treads, spiked to dig and crunch into the rockface, were starting to climb roachlike down the walls towards them.

“Time to saddle up, boys,” Edith said as she put her helmet back on and one of the Vuvalini drove a motorcycle over, waiting for Freddie to take ownership of it before hopping on with one of her companions. “Keep your firepower handy and don’t spare the tires. We gonna try and outrun em, but darlins–” she flashed a madcap grin at witch and fairy, “–if you can use them wild and wonnerful powers of you’rn to send some’a yonder motherfuckers to their rottendick maker, then by golly _do it_.”

Freddie was too pleased, too _relieved_ , to see Edith, to protest beyond a slight frown and cough when Lurr threw himself enthusiastically up against Freddie’s back, hard enough to knock most of the wind out of him, the War Boy trying desperately to be part of their little family reunion - but when the Vuvalini called their attention to the monstrous machines making their way down into the canyon, that relief and happiness was temporarily put on ice as the fairy accepted the motorcycle from Edith’s nearest mate, immediately handing it off to Lurr again, well aware that he would never be able to drive it properly himself. 

“You and I both know I’d kill us all by accident before the rest of those things even had a chance to,” he said to Ephram with a wry sort of chuckle, stripping off his jacket and Ephram’s spare shoulder holster and passing the latter over to his husband before tugging off his shirt too, dropping it into the sand with his coat, his wings snapping out to their full span and immediately beginning to beat so quickly that they became a humming blur, lifting him a foot off the ground.

“I’ll do better with my dust if I’m flying,” he said with a grin, leaning over to give Ephram a kiss, and then blowing another one to Edith. “Shoot at everything that moves,” he told them, and then he winked, “So long as it isn’t blue,” before shooting up into the air and flying straight for the closest roach-mobile, unsure he could generate enough dust in the moment to do anything about the vehicles as a whole, but fairly certain he could hobble them.

And even more certain he could hobble the drivers.

So long as they let him get close enough.

“Get on, get on,” Lurr whined, and Ephram grabbed hold of Freddie’s head to kiss him back before slinging himself onto the motorbike behind the War Boy. “You just worry about knockin’ em on their ass, honey,” he called to his fairy, unslinging his rifle as Freddie rose up higher in the air, and pressing into service the fairydust-witchmagic ammunition that had served him so well in other blight worlds. “I’ll keep anyfucker from getting the jump on you, don’t you worry.”

The Vuvalini were making severe inroads into their attackers already, flurries of sand and wheels and weapons, and Ephram reminded himself forcefully that his grandmother was already deceased and so hearing her whoop it up as she slaughtered these semi-monster attackers was entirely without threat. How very solid and corporeal she’d felt when she’d hugged them was of no matter, nope, didn’t mean a thing. 

“Why aren’t we moving?” Ephram suddenly realized out loud, and prodded Lurr in the back with his rifle butt … only to find the boy was staring up at the cobalt blue blur that was Freddie Watts on the wing, his silvery-chapped mouth open, eyes wide and streaming tears. “Oh, jeez, kid,” Ephram grunted, although he couldn’t really be that angry. Freddie _was_ an impressive sight to behold. And he was making impressive dents in the encroaching onslaught of those ugly vehicles crabbing down the canyon walls, with Ephram picking off anybody who seemed likely to plunge spear or mace or fucking mechanical hand into his husband’s viscera.

Lurr revved them into forward motion, and for the next frantic, bloody, very fucking _loud_ twenty or so minutes, fairy and witch and Vuvalini and single War Boy cut their ways through the bizarre and nauseating creatures that were bearing down on them. And despite Ephram getting shallowly sliced along one side from hip to shoulderblade, and Lurr having a boulder smash one of his knees so hard it popped out, they were doing pretty well.

Until one of the mangle-faced horrors leapt out of its rapidly plummeting vehicle and his body met Freddie’s mid-air, knocking him out of flight.

Everything was a blur up in the air as Freddie darted and weaved as best he could through the oncoming nightmarish onslaught, the steady-handed confident shots delivered by his darling from down on the ground more than enough to allow Freddie the opportunities required to interfere with his fairy dust, using a few well-placed glamours of steering wheels and gearshifts, windscreens and pedals, to disrupt and damage the mechanical brutes trajectory. Even going so far as to glamour the drivers themselves into a few useless houseplants, or toddlers, or one particularly robust little pot-bellied pig.

But it was as he was temporarily distracted by the squealing pig, no longer able to control its horrifying vehicle, that Freddie left himself open to attack, and a chrome-mouthed monster, his face a terrifying mask of scarification, leapt from the passenger seat of the horrible death-machine clawing it’s way down the canyon side, and hit Freddie dead-on, grabbing at his wings and clinging to the winded fairy, screaming about Valhalla as the two of them tumbled faster and faster out of the sky.

Freddie was petrified, too frightened, too taken aback by the hideousness of his assailant, to produce enough dust to help himself, and the two of them connected with the earth with a sickening thud, a cloud of reddish yellow sand billowing up around them.

Ephram’s heart juddered into a series of thuds so sickening that he thought he might throw up as he watched Freddie plummeting to the ground with one of those silver-mouthed monsters dragging him down; he froze, unable to even react, until Lurr knocked him down to narrowly avoid being sliced in half by a falling piece of shorn vehicle.

“I can’t–” Ephram started, struggling to get free and stand up, to make his way over to Freddie, but then his great-grandmother was there in front of him, pressing her hand to his chest to stop him as he got to his feet. 

“This is how it works, child,” Edith said. “You boys came to fetch me, and this is how we leave. You know that the leaving is never easy, Ephram.” She gave him a tight smile. “Now take my hand, and we’ll follow Freddie out.”

“Yes ma’am,” Ephram said instinctively, still, after all these many years. Lurr made a frantic little noise, and Ephram felt a lurch of pity for the War Boy –

–but a hail of bullets opened on them, and Ephram felt Edith’s hand tighten on his–

–and then they were gone, leaving only another swirl of ruddy, yellowed sand.


End file.
